


Weakened Warrior

by yodelingintothevoid



Series: My Only Sunshine [4]
Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Adorable, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, First Kiss, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Pillow Fights, SPOILERS up to and including S4E25, Sharing a Bed, Survivor Guilt, finally alone, warrior couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 09:28:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8139062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yodelingintothevoid/pseuds/yodelingintothevoid
Summary: Fleshed out version of the events surrounding Sara's birth. "And we’ll wait out the light together. It’s what we’ve always done, right?”I couldn't get through this season without my Five/Sam heart nearly breaking.This is a fleshed out fic, with some world-building, Angst With A Happy Ending.





	

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS up to and including S4E25  
> Devoted to all my Fives with anxiety issues/panic attacks, esp. those who occasionally struggle with the intensity of this game (read: me)

Haggard.

Runner Five stumbled over the gateway of Abel and fell heavily to one knee as the gates shuddered closed behind her. She stayed down, bent over the bloody bundle in her arms. Her back surged with the effort of containing her pumping lungs, but she was ghastly still.

Abel citizens ran forward as she entered the gate, but stopped abruptly as they saw her. Their stoic superhero was bleeding freely from innumerable wounds. A gash ran up one leg and some of the blood was already crusting over, glossed by new blood running wet and free. Her face was curtained behind her hair and the bundle in her arms was silent.

The nurses ran to her without stopping to stare. Maxine’s assistants had always half belonged to the runners. They daily met them at the gate, supervised their wounds, bite checks, and sterilizations. They cheered them during routine quarantines and even acted as personal trainers.

Three nurses fell to their knees beside Five, one of them fumbling for the leg wound while two others reached for the bundle.

“No!” Five’s voice rattled out, hoarse and disturbing and very, very unusual in such a public setting. “No, don’t touch her,” Five climbed alone to her feet, and her body could not seem to stop shuddering. Her face was plastered with sweat and dust, and her hair was tumbling out of its braid. “Where is Maxine?” she asked, and the nurses made no move to stop her, said nothing of the breach in quarantine protocol, just pointed silently to the hospital.

When Five moved forward into the bending crowd, she moved like the dead. Her feet lurched and stumbled and she looked down at the tiny face in her arms as if it was the only lifeline in a universe of hurricanes.

Five had not stopped running for two days. First it had been a coffin - a normal enough run with Four and Amelia, suddenly unsettled. A couple of brief skirmishes, and the hauling of the unwieldly crate meant to contain the baby’s other mother during the birth.

They fought off the zombs, hauled it over the fence, and ran with it to the gate under the impetus of the news of Maxine starting labor. There was no time to rest. By the time they reached Abel the news was all bad: the helicopter wasn’t coming, and the baby was. They swung the coffin into the van and Five had time to down half a bottle of water before everything went to hell.

The car wreck, Maxine’s troubled labor, Paula turning. Bombs in New Canton and bombs in Abel and bombs underfoot and everything was on fire.

Cynthia. Cynthia writhing again into her mind, tormenting her. Sam standing over Paula, cocking a gun. Tom on top of her, pinned and struggling and wounded while Sam screamed her name. Tom disappearing with the baby. This baby she had argued against for so long.

Too soon for new life. How could one life replace so many?

Five had not stopped running in two days.

Chasing Tom. Steve and the zombie that looked like her. The school. The school. Where Sam had…  
-  
Five stumbled entering the hospital as well, and then everything was blurry and strange. Maxine was crying aloud, her usual poise shattered under drugs and hormones and life and death. Paula was there and yet not there.

Five sat by Maxine’s bed, watching the baby struggle to latch onto her first breast, choking and spluttering.

Everyone was choking except Five.

Five was tired. Her arm spread out on the bed next to Maxine, watching the baby. A nurse was doing something to her leg. She felt the warm sting of a needle, heard something about stitches and bandaging and blood transfusions.

Five was not aware of when she fell asleep.  
-  
“Is she going to go out to get him?” Rani was a very young nurse, and had been transferred from New Canton just weeks before.

“I’d like to see anyone try to stop her,” Norma was much older, having first joined Abel three months into the outbreak. “Whoever they choose to send out, Five will be among them. We believe that if possible, whoever was closest to them when they were alive should be the one to put them down after they’re dead.”

“Oh, so were they sleeping together?” Rani asked.

Norma turned to her in slow disgust, “Don’t talk so lightly about what you don’t understand.”

Unimpressed, Rani turned to look over her shoulder at the wounded runner, tucked carefully into a cot in the quietest corner of the hospital. “So they were sleeping together then? Five and Sam? I’d like to know for sure. The rumors are everywhere here, but we talk about it in New Canton too.”

Norma jerked a dried sheet from her laundry basket and flapped it crisply in Rani’s face. “Being close to someone’s got nothing to do with whether or not you put them between your legs!”

“I’m sorry,” Rani’s face fell slightly. “I know you all liked him a lot and I know that we’re all in a lot more danger now that he’s dead. I just… they’re like celebrities, you know? And when she came in like that this morning – everyone by now is used to losing people. So when you see someone that torn up it usually means that they lost someone who was more than just ‘people’ to them, you know?”

Norma turned the sheet over, spreading it wide and folding it carefully several times before she answered. "I know none of you like to talk about Moonchild, but I don’t know if your people realize why Five was so involved in her destruction.”

Rani sat down on the bed, twisting her fingers together hard. “I know she saved us. Even though she insisted it was someone else.”

“It was several people. But you see, Sam… well Moonchild took control of Five first and used her for quite some time, really. It was horrifying. We all knew how much Sam cared about her, he never was very subtle about it, but when she was missing, it was like he went mad. Just this bundle of nerves, constantly holed up in his shack, talking to her day and night over the headset. We knew she couldn’t hear him.” Norma glanced over at the sleeping form on the bed and dropped her voice. “Five killed people, Rani.”

“We’ve all killed people,” the girl returned bitterly.

Norma shook her head. “No. Not like this. Innocent people, living people. I don’t know the details. Apparently Moonchild tricked her into thinking she was doing something else, but they died for sure, and by her hand. People she knew, people she’d rescued before. She watched them die. Then Moonchild told her to come back here.”

“Can you please stop saying her name?” Rani asked.

“It’s important for you to understand,” Norma explained, smoothing out the creases in the sheet and placing it back in the bin. “Five came back to Abel. She snuck in and opened the gates.”

Rani’s head came up in wonder, suddenly honing in on the story.

“Moon—that woman wanted information and would stop at nothing to get it. Five distracted everyone with an invasion and then started attacking everyone who found her. Who knows what – that woman was telling her to do, but she hurt them bad.”

Rani was biting at her cheek, eyeing Five’s prone figure.

“Well she came into the children’s quarters to steal – a device – for that woman and Sam was in there.”

Rani’s eyes raced back to Norma’s and her breath picked up.

“Sam had guessed it was her and where she’d be. He came alone and unarmed. And he just started talking to her.”

“What did she do?” the words were out before Rani seemed to realize she’d spoken.

Norma smiled at her sudden earnestness. “Sam trusted her that much. She’d put the whole township in danger and ripped through everyone in front of her. She’d even killed on command. But with Sam… well. She had her axe in her hand and I wasn’t there, but the story goes that it was like watching someone having a seizure. She was shaking and her hands were writhing on the weapon and she swayed back and forth. Sam just stood there like a rock, pleading with her to listen. Apparently Moon-the woman knew that she was asking too much, because she turned the volume all the way up on the headset, and everyone inside the building could hear how loudly she was shouting and playing the tones to maintain Five’s attention. She was telling her to kill him.”

Rani shook her head. “You can’t stop it. You can’t say no. It’s hard enough to even want to say no, even if the tones are far away.”

Norma smiled lightly, turning to look with affection on Five. “I don’t know what would have happened. But Simon was tailing her. He had a bit of the drug they were using to hold off the mind control. He sprang forward and injected it and that shouldn’t have been possible either except that Five was in such a state she had no idea what was happening around her. The drugs don’t activate that quickly, but it seemed to buy her a second. She turned from Simon and looked at Sam all wild and just sort of screamed. I heard that too, most of us did, we were all running to them at that point. I think something in her broke in that moment. Then she turned and bolted. Faster than I’ve ever seen her go, straight out the door and to the still open gates. Simon found her much later wandering around some old mental hospital. He said it was like she was trying to get help. When she came around, she asked him if Sam was dead. Guess she doesn’t remember much of that moment.”

Rani shook her head, “None of that story is possible. None of that can be true.”

Norma shrugged. “Simon was the one to tell that story. He was there for most of it. He had his faults, but I watched his eyes as he told it and he had no reason to lie. Now I’ve never been the victim of that type of mind control but you have. So you tell me. What kind of bond is that, to run wild, kill innocents, break into your own home, swing open the gates, bust through all your friends and then stand your ground when facing just one person? What kind of intimacy…”

Dr. Lobatse pushed back the curtain serving as a door to that part of the building and walked in with an icy glint in her eye. “Oh is this the gossiping room, then? I must have been misinformed. For some reason I was under the delusion that this was a hospital!”

Norma and Rani stood up instantly, putting their hands behind their backs.

The doctor swung her eyes between them. “Well? What was this discussion about then?”

Norma cleared her throat. “Rani was asking about Sam. About Five and Sam.”

“About whether or not they’re in love with each other? Well I don’t believe that requires much time to answer really. Now hush your voices before you wake her and come out here. Bring the laundry!”

She swept them into the next room and reseated herself at her desk, going over the files with a pinched expression. “I swear, I don’t know how Maxine lived like this for so long. The only doctor in a camp this large! Even if we didn’t have zombies and quarantines, it would still be too big for anyone to do alone. I’ve only had the hospital to myself for barely a weak and I feel like all I’m doing is putting out fires –“ she looked up suddenly, realizing that both nurses were still staring at her. “And then there’s you two in here gossiping away in front of the sleeping patients who need rest. And I had hoped that the gossip in this township might lessen somewhat in the absence of…” she breathed deeply, putting down a file and pressing her fingers hard against her neck. “I said that wrong. He’s not ‘absent’, he’s dead. And honestly, I have no idea what his absence will mean to this township. Or what it will mean to her.” She gestured to the curtain wearily.

Rani cleared her throat. “I mean, I guess I assumed he was in love with her. I just couldn’t tell what she was thinking. So are they like – together?”

Norma tried to look uninterested.

Dr. Lobatse rolled her eyes. “Is this a common question you ask of people, or just of celebrities?”

Rani considered. “No, I pretty much am constantly wondering about everyone, honestly. They’re both just so pretty though, I had to know.”

Lobatse huffed a laugh. “Well, then, no, I should think not. I don’t get the feeling Sam’s looked at another person for two seconds together since she walked in. But apparently he had a girl before that and it didn’t end well and it leaves you sort of… scarred, you know? And Five… who knows what Five is thinking. But she always puts the township first and I’m sure she’d be respectful of the fact that it might be dangerous to get involved with her own…”

She was interrupted by a low clattering from the next room and then Five appeared in the doorway, her hair already neatly braided in anticipation of a run. “I’m ready,” she said quietly. “Where’s Janine?”

Dr. Lobatse stood up somewhat hastily and her cheeks were almost pink. “Five, I’m afraid if you’re preparing for another run, I must say, as your doctor…”

Five’s eyes rested on her imperviously. “My leg is stitched and bound up tightly. I won’t be going far. Thank you, doctor.”

“You have had barely three hours of recuperation!”

The outside door fell shut behind Five and the three women looked at one another.

Rani giggled. “D’ya think she…?”

“She had time to braid her hair, what else do you think she was listening to?” Lobatse sat back down and stared sightlessly at her paperwork. “Poor girl.”  
-  
They found Sam curled in a corner of the dumpster, knees drawn up to his forehead, arms clasping his legs. His eyes were already dead – blank and white as he looked up at them. A rumble of voices sounded all around her, but Five didn’t hear anything. She flew to him, sort of scooping him into her side, lifting and supporting him. She didn’t need his verification to ensure that he had been bitten. Her hands had passed over the wet, churned up flesh on his back and shoulders as she lifted him. It was over. It was already over. She waited patiently, supporting his warm weight, waiting for permission to bring him home.

As they moved towards Abel, she stumbled through the trees following the others, saying nothing. Sam was not himself, much calmer and more assured. This was the new self that had been born with Sara. Everyone was fighting to find him a way out of this, but he seemed very resigned, and only desperate to keep anyone else from being hurt. He kept glancing down at Five’s expressionless profile. She just clung to him, using every ounce of force to keep him on his feet, keep him moving, get him home.

Then he was telling her to leave again. For the second time that day, he was pushing at her shoulders, pointing eagerly behind her, pushing her away.

As she ran away, tears of frustrated grief burning behind her eyelids, she kept twisting her head to watch him stumbling off away from the gunfire and monsters.

How many times could she say goodbye in one day?  
-  
Sam’s day had been a dizzy blur of death to life. From the minute Veronica had allowed him out of the hospital (“just for a few hours to get some test results, don’t go far!”) he had been drowned in congratulations. People were crying, hugging him, slipping him little presents, or just nodding gruffly at him in passing, depending on their manner. Jack and Eugene insisted on loudly reading some of the messages they had received after his “death” and the new messages pouring in at the news of his miraculous salvation. He spent every minute possible with Maxine and the baby and even had some time to talk to Paula, who almost seemed too worn out to fully comprehend her new life.

Five – well Five had disappeared. She had been in the room with him, of course, when Paula had been healed, and had heard with her own ears Veronica’s pronouncement of his immunity. Then a nurse had pulled her away to clean her up and reapply the bandages on her leg and she had just sort of vanished. He kept glancing around him. He knew exactly how long it took for a runner to be showered, checked for broken skin, and have a bandage replaced. As the minutes continued to sift over him he grew restless, but his anxious query after her delivered the report that she was already in bed. Apparently she had nearly fallen asleep on the table and required a nurse’s assistance to get up to the farmhouse for the night.

Well, of course. Obviously she needed rest. It had been nearly two full days of extreme exertion and no sleep. It just seemed… well it seemed odd that his best friend would be the only person not able to give him even a minute of celebration.

He went quiet after that and took an early bedtime himself.

The runners and their radio operators all slept in the attic of Janine’s farmhouse, with the (mostly faulty) reasoning that it was the quietest place in Abel. They bunked together in two largeish rooms, but there were two small individual bedrooms at the end of the hall that were apportioned out in turn, or more usually, given for privacy to runners who had endured unusual injuries or trauma outside the gates. Five was given one of these tonight and Sam had been granted the other.

He stood outside her door for a good ten minutes to make sure she was asleep, and then slid into his own small bed. There was too much from the day to process in the moments before sleep, so he didn’t try. He just lay still and turned his eyes to the wall between him and Five. The only clear emotion running through his mind as he lay still and waited for sleep was a calm sort of hatred for the ugly plywood frame keeping him from seeing her safe and hearing her breathe.  
-  
He awoke to the sound of a zomb in Five’s room.

Before he was fully aware, he had already lit the candle at his bedside, and taken the heavy metal candlestick in his right hand as a weapon. Rain hammered down on the roof outside, but he still made out the unmistakable rasping moans and a slight scraping sound from the room next door. Staying low, clutching the light in his left hand and the metal stand in his right, he pushed at her door and it fell open gently.

Five was sitting on the edge of the bed, bent over, her face clutched into her elbow, screaming silently and rocking back and forth.

There was hardly anyone left in Abel whom Sam hadn’t coached through a panic attack at least once, and Five was one of the few. Until now, he had almost let himself believe that she was immune to them. Setting the light carefully down on the floor, he was at her side in a moment, clutching his hands together to keep them from flying to her.

“Alright Five, no words, just keep breathing okay? Can you nod your head for me to answer?”

Five looked up wildly, her face red and tear-streaked, flickering eerily in the candle light. Her breath was churning wildly and her arm stayed locked across her mouth, but her eyes were trained on his face.

“Do you want me to stay?” Sam choked out his first question. He had walked through these questions so many times, but never with her, and it was different. It was different.

She nodded, gasping.

His shoulders relaxed and he caught at his own breath. The questions were a lifeline to her. Her answers were a lifeline to him. “Do you want me to keep talking to you?”

She hesitated this time, but her eyes didn’t move from his face. She nodded.

He nodded back encouragingly, seeking orientation. “Do you want me to touch you?”

She jumped slightly away from him and he flinched at the sudden movement. She shook her head hard.

“Alright, alright, that’s fine. I’ll stay here then.” Sam settled himself away from her, setting his tired shoulders into the hard metal pole that poked up from the bottom of the bed. His head was swimming with sleep and he struggled for words. “It’s been such a long day and honestly I wanted to talk to you. I know – I know you’re not a superhero Five. You’re not-superhero-ness is probably my favorite part of you. They think you’re a god, but I think that diminishes it really. I’ve seen the way you try, how you push for it. Push yourself every time you leave the gates. Push yourself to go those extra steps to pick up that one extra thing. Push yourself past all the horrible...” he gestured to the rain-lashed window vaguely.

Her breath was hitching higher and he had obviously gone way off base, so he struggled to reorient. “You did amazing today, Five, just amazing. And look at us! We’re all here! I mean, we did it. Paula and the baby, even Maxine – everyone’s alright. And listen to the rain, Five, think of how beautiful it’s going to be tomorrow with the happy wet little plants and the sunlight and the kids playing in the dew on the grass. Everything’s going to be green and good smelling and alive! We’re alive! Everyone is alive and our baby is feeding and happy and oh Five, so much of that is because of you.”

Her eyes didn’t move from his face and her gasping struggle was calming somewhat. She moved to wipe her nose on her sleeve and tried to choke out a response, but he hushed her.

“Please just breathe,” he said, almost begging he was so ready for this to be over. “Please just find your breath. Then you can tell me what thought caused this and we will kill it together, okay? We’ll just pull apart whatever idea it is and look at it from every angle and you’ll see it’s nothing to be afraid of. If it’s Paula, we can go right now and look at her. She was so much better that Veronica let her go to dinner, without any kind of monitor or machine or anything! She’s breathing so much she was laughing with the baby before she fell asleep! And if it’s Maxie we can go see her too! She was such a champ about that birth that she’ll be up and about in a few days! And if it’s the baby that will be even better because the baby you can pick up and cuddle and she can squeeze your finger and make her little smacking noises and you’ll know that nothing can ever hurt her again because you’ll be there and I’ll be there and all of us will protect her to our last breath now that we can see her. And if it’s anything else –“

“It’s you.” Five’s voice came out smothered and tiny. She choked in a breath and tried to steady herself, but she was shaking so hard she couldn’t calm down. She moved toward him suddenly and he moved in the same breath, catching her face on his shoulder and she was curling into him hard, anchoring herself in his sweater. “You – died,” she gasped. And then the words were out, stumbling and tossing on her lips, as inescapable as the panic. “You died. It was over, just so quickly. I wasn’t fast enough and you were trapped and then you gave me the baby and told me to go - you told me to go! And I had the baby and I had to. I had to. You pushed me away and then you were screaming and you died. You died, Sam! You were dead. And I came home like you said and it wasn’t… it just wasn’t anymore. It wasn’t like coming home anymore.” He tried to speak but she pulled at his sweater again, drowning in words. “You were supposed to stay here. You were always supposed to be here and safe and I would keep you safe and I couldn’t, Sam. I couldn’t keep you safe. I wasn’t fast enough. You were dead and everything went – flat.”

“Well… I’m not dead, am I? Is that… is that why you were crying?”

“What if Veronica’s wrong? What if something went wrong and she thinks you’re not dying but you still are? What if you’re infected right now and tomorrow…”

He kissed her forehead, trying to slow his own breathing so she could feel how calm he was, even though her panic was lancing through him like a heated blade. It was killing him to know that this was the way in which she paid for all of her labor for Abel, and that she had never sought out help.

“I was bitten so many times,” he whispered into her hair, “all over my body by different zombs. It’s been nearly a day now with no coughing, no fever, hardly even pain from the bites. They’re starting to scab over now. I saw the slides of my blood, now it’s like I was never even infected. Not only am I not dying, but I’m never going to have to die, not from this. I would give anything to share it with everyone we know, to share it with you. This is a good thing, such a good thing. And Veronica thinks Sara might have it too.”

“But if that’s true, it makes you a target.” Five couldn’t seem to stop talking, all of her anxieties bubbling through at once, but her breathing had slowed somewhat. “Everyone will come for you, not to kill you but to take you away, to experiment on you and torture you.”

“Then you’ll come get me back!” he responded cheerfully. “Just like you did today! With all the Abel runners looking for me, I wouldn’t even be frightened. But not everyone on Earth is bad. And as soon as Veronica finds a way to turn me into the cure, we will all be like me and I can just be normal again.”

She lay still, her breath slowing winding down to a low shuddering in her chest. “You put too much faith in me, Sam,” she whispered.

“I put exactly as much faith in you as you’ve earned,” he replied quickly. “And that’s probably too much pressure anyway. Would you like to try and lie down now?”

She shook her head hard into his chest and he beamed inside.

“Your mind is an incredible thing you know,” he murmured, “and it’s going to do everything it can to protect you. It’s running through every variable of every bad scenario it can think of as a way of protecting you. And sometimes it gets overheated. Is this the first time you’ve had one of these?”

She shook her head.

He fought off the unbidden image of her screaming like this night after night, alone in this bed or out in the woods or hidden away in some storeroom in the township, alone… “Well then you know that tomorrow you’re going to be a little shaky and tired, but peaceful. Your brain will have reset and found a way to push out all that extra energy, and you’ll walk outside and talk to everyone and see Paula all healed up and happy again, and visit Maxine and see Sara having breakfast like the – the screaming genius she is and you can walk in the garden with your shoes off and just breathe all day. And everything will make sense again. You know that, right?”

She was limp now, her arms folded in loosely to her body and her lungs surged on empty. “No,” she muttered, and her voice rasped, worn out from sobs. “I don’t know that right now.”

“Then I’ll stay with you,” Sam replied, as if it was the natural conclusion. “I’ll stay right here the whole night and any moment you wake up you can wake me up and feel my pulse and if you need to walk down to the hospital to see Maxine and Paula and Sara we can go right then and listen to them breathing. And we’ll wait out the light together. It’s what we’ve always done, right?”

She shifted, and he caught his breath, thinking she was trying to push him away, but she put her hand up to his neck and felt for his pulse. Her stumbling fingers found it and she looked up at him, calmer and nodding.

That sat like that for a while, until his arm went numb and the driving rain and her own exhaustion started to pull her away from him like the tide. “Here, Five,” he whispered, desperately hoping she was still awake.

She sighed restlessly.

“Can you lay down?” he asked. “Here, put this hand on my wrist.” He carefully lifted her fingers from his neck and put them on his pulse point on his arm. “Still feel my heartbeat?” he asked.

She frowned slightly, running her fingers nervously over his skin, then nodded sleepily. He wasn’t surprised. They had been sitting quietly in the dark for nearly half an hour and his heart still hadn’t calmed its wild convulsions over having her in his arms. It couldn’t have been a difficult pulse to find.

They lay down together carefully, and he could still make out her puffy eyes and wild hair in the flickering light from his candle, so carefully placed on her bedside table and so wastefully still burning.

Well, let it burn. It was a special occasion.

“Thank you, Sam,” she whispered, but he had to guess at it because her voice was so low and heavy, and scraped dry. He wanted to do more, to get her a cup of water from the kitchen, to blow out the candle, to wrap her in every warm scrap of fabric the house could provide against the cold. But all of those would have meant separating her from his heartbeat, and he knew that was what she needed most.  
-  
He woke up naturally, no alarm screeching in his ear, no Janine pounding at his door to drag him down to the coms station. He was off-duty, Veronica’s orders, for at least 48 hours.

They had both slept so hard they had hardly shifted and her fingers were still wrapped gently around his wrist. He wondered if she had awoken in the night, but he doubted it.

He shifted towards her as quietly as possible, his hands aching for her, and unwilling to replace the physical barrier that had finally broken between them last night. He reached out to smooth back her hair and she opened her eyes immediately.

“Still alive,” he whispered, voice husky with sleep. “I promised.”

Her eyes dropped to his wrist, as though his voice and breath were insufficient evidence, and she stroked it quietly. “Still alive,” she whispered back, her voice cracking with the effort.

“Here, let me get you a drink from the…”

Her fingers closed hard on his wrist. “Please stay.”

He sat frozen, curled up in her blankets, looking down at her.

Five smiled. A full, curling, groggy, happy smile that filled him like coffee fills a mug. Then she pulled on his wrist, the one he was using to support himself and he tumbled back into the pillows. They wrestled for a while, giddy and stupid and wasting time like pre-apocalyptic children, just enjoying the moments.

They collapsed onto the pillows after just a few minutes, their bodies too worn out to keep up the marginal exercise. Five was flushed and panting and he saw how chapped her lips were with dehydration and the salt from last night’s tears.

“Here,” he exclaimed, sitting up. “I’m going to get you water from the kitchen and I promise, I promise not to die in the few minutes I’ll be out of the room, okay? Do you trust me? I’m going to try so hard not to die.”

She lay still, observing him silently and then surged up quickly, kissing him softly on the lips. “Thank you,” she whispered and then, instantly embarrassed, turned to bury her face in the pillow again.

Sam sat very still. Then he cleared his throat. “Um, I’m afraid I didn’t get all that. Could you – could you repeat that?”

He saw the tiny sliver of her visible cheek curl up in a smile and she lifted her face up slowly. “I said ‘thank you’,” she repeated, clearly, not making eye contact.

“No, no I got all that bit, I understood that much quite well, but I thought there was something else, something else – if I could just have it repeated one more time to understand…”

Her smile flickered and vanished as she watched him, her face suddenly very grave. She lifted her hand to his neck and drew him down solemnly to kiss him again, much more carefully this time, luxuriously. Then she drew his chin forward again, dropping a kiss on his neck and moving her lips towards his ear. “Thank you, Sam,” she whispered again.

**Author's Note:**

> Exists in the My Only Sunshine universe, in that everything is basically in-canon and the world-building is the same for every story.


End file.
